Archive for August, 2006

Witchhunt for a blogger (4) – Is it all a hoax?

The Sydney Morning Herald just reported that the whole Chinabounder blog seems to be a hoax! The blog was set up by performance artists, both men and women, from Britain, Australia, Japan and China. They 'fabricated its content as an investigation into online vigilante behavior.' If this is true they did a good job!The SMH sent an email to the email address on Chinabounders blog, and got a reply from the group. The group claims that the blog was closed out of safety concern for the group's...
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Witchhunt for a blogger (3)

Danwei writes today that the Sex in Shanghai story now even reached the Beijing Times. Professor Zhang Jiehai seems not satisfied with the password that Chinabounder put on his blog and wants to keep finding him. He thinks Chinabounder is scared. Could be, but maybe Chinabounder is just smart, and noticed that the situation was getting out of control. Then closing off the source to the main public is a good strategy to try to cool down things a bit.Also the English Guardian picked up the story....
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Gaming with Chinese Heroes

A couple of months ago I wrote about a new Chinese game that had been developed around Chinese national heroe Lei Feng. Although I never see people playing the game, the government decided to build another online game around Chinese heroes. Also this time Lei Feng will be participating, and he will be accompanied by among others Zheng Chenggong, a 17th century general who 'liberated Taiwan from the Dutch'.But will the game be a success? That's doubtful considering the tasks that need to be...
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Witchhunt for a blogger (2)

It seems that yesterday's witchhunt has forced Chinabounder to close down his blog, or at least to only make it accesible for invited readers. This morning he still posted a new article, which had over 100 comments by lunchtime when I read it. But it seems a few minutes ago he decided to pull the plug himself, or someone hacked his blogger password and did it for him.If there are any new developments regarding this in the Chinese blogosphere I will post them on my...
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From Tibet to Nepal by train (or bike)

China loves ambitious infrastructure projects, and normally not only announces them but also finishes these projects - and finishes them quickly (something that does not always happen in Holland, many projects there are eventually cancelled or drag on forever). Just last month the train connection between Beijing and Lhasa (in Tibet) was finished, a project that was impossible to carry out according to more than one foreign scientist. But the Chinese managed to pull it off, although there are...
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Witchhunt for a blogger

An English blogger in Shanghai might have blogged himself into trouble. This person, who blogs here under the name Chinabounder, has had a blog for a couple of months already. But because he hosted it at blogspot, it was unavailable without a proxy until a few weeks ago (China unblocked blogspot.com accounts a few weeks ago). Therefore only a couple of people were following his blog through a proxy server on the mainland.Chinabounder is an English teacher who likes to seduce former female...
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West Lake run

Sunday morning my dad and I decided to run around Hangzhou's famous West Lake. Because of the high temperature in Hangzhou (it's even warmer than Shanghai, when we drove into the city my car showed an outside temperature of 42 degrees), we decided to leave early. So we started at 6:30 AM to beat the heat and the crowds. But that was in vain: not only was the temperature already above 30 degrees, but also the crowds were bigger than during day time. Everywhere elderly Chinese were practicing Tai...
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Moganshan & The Lodge

Friday night we drove to Moganshan, a small town high up in the mountains of Zhejiang, not far from Hangzhou. There were no traffic jams, so the drive over from Shanghai took us only about 2.5 hours. Moganshan is quite famous because it used to be a resort for rich foreigners and Chinese in the early 1900's. The mountaintop is covered with more than one hundred old Western style villas, most of them in a dilapidated state. Instead of one family, most now have several families living in one...
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Weekend trip to Nanjing

Last weekend I took a trip to Nanjing with my parents. There is a 8-lane highway from Shanghai to Nanjing, so the 300 km trip takes less than 3 hours. The first 80 km is still quite busy, but once you pass Suzhou the toll road is suddenly almost empty. I was not sure if there are any speed camera's, so I put my cruise control on 130 and had a relaxed drive to China's former capital.Nanjing is a city with a turbulent history, and it still has a lot of historical sites that make it worth to go...
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Alexa

Alexa is widely used all over the world to track the performance of websites. You can see the reach (how many people out of 1 million internet users visit your site on a certain day), the rank (how many sites are bigger than yours), and the page views per user for every site. I use it daily to check the statistics for among others game.com.cn and toodou.com.Alexa is, however, not very accurate for Chinese websites. The way they measure the data depends heavily on how many people have installed...
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Mooncakes and corruption

It is a tradition in China to give mooncakes to business relations in the weeks before the mid-autumn festival. This year the festival will take place on October 6, but the first mooncakes have already appeared in shops. I don't like mooncakes, especially the ones filled with beanpaste or eggyolk (problem is, you often don't know what the filling is until you eat them). So most of the mooncakes I get I give to friends or staff. The only ones I really like are the ice-cream ones from Haagen-Dasz...
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China Gaming column on Gamasutra

Gamasutra, the US based website about games and game development, will publish a regular column about gaming in China. Gaming specialist Shang Koo from Pacific Epoch will write the articles, and his first column 'From Kingsoft With Love' is now online. I did not find an RSS feed on the site (shame on you Gamasutra!), so I suppose you will have to go back regularly to the site to find out if a new column is online.At the online gaming conference in Shanghai last month I met Simon Carless, one of...
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Globalization

Brands like McDonald's, KFC and Starbucks are truly global brands. Even in China you can find McD's and KFC's in secondary and even third-tier cities, and also Starbucks is growing rapidly. This weekend, for example, I had coffee and a brownie in a Starbucks in Nanjing. OK, the staff at the Sofitel Nanjing had never heard of XinBaKe (is this actually the right pinyin for the Chinese name of Starbucks?), but while driving through the city center I spotted the coffee chain right away.On the...
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How to demolish a building in one day

The speed of construction work in China never ceases to amaze me. 20 story buildings are constructed in just several months, roads can be built almost overnight, and new subway lines are announced every few months. But also demolishing a building goes really fast. Most of the time old buildings are not blown up, but they are 'de-constucted' manually.A nice example happened right outside my office window. The pictures were all taken within 24 hours. In the morning there was still a 6-story...
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Using Hotmail in China

A short post to help people who are having problems to log into Hotmail in China. As many tourists have probably noted, the domain hotmail.com is not accessible in China anymore (at least in Shanghai, I have not tested it in other cities). It seems the DNS is blocked, but that does not mean that you cannot check your mail of course.If you know a bit about the internet, solutions for this will be old news for you, but I think many people just give up if the site does not load. There are several...
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Shanghai World Financial Center keeps on growing

A few days ago I was looking out of the window in my study, and noticed the top of a crane (or something that looked like it) next to the Grand Hyatt (Jinmao Tower). I took out my binoculars, because this is at least 7-8 km from my house. It was difficult to see, but two days later I noticed that the crane was a bit higher, and the top of a building had appeared. It turned out that this it the top of the new Shanghai World Financial Center, which at 101 stories (491 meters) will be China's...
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Game.com.cn & Youxi.cn in Formula 3

Ho-Pin Tung is a very succesful Dutch-Chinese race car driver. I know him a couple of years already, from the time I just turned entrepreneur. At that time he was racing in the Formula BMW-Asia championship (that he won in 2003). Ho-Pin now races in the Recaro Formula 3 championship that he is currently leading. The picture was taken yesterday during the Rizla Racing Days in Assen, and if you take a closer look here and here you will see that Ho-Pin's car has among others ads for our online...
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Registered mail

My wife told me an interesting story today about delivery of a registered mail. She went to the post office to pick up a registered letter, and when she was there she asked why we always have to go there to pick these letters up ourselves. I had always assumed the answer would be that nobody was home when they had come to deliver, but that was not the case.The reason, the post office clerk told her, is that they only deliver registered mail until the 3rd floor, and we live on the 37th floor. My...
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Le Meridien Sheshan – the perfect weekend getaway

The weekend promises to be warm again in Shanghai. The forecast is similar to the past couple of weeks, with a mixture of clouds and sunshine and temperatures around 35 degrees. Great weather to spend a day on the beach - if Shanghai would have a decent beach, that is. But now there is a good alternative, the new Le Meridien hotel in Sheshan.Sheshan is the only place close to Shanghai that is not totally flat. There are several hills covered with woods, and there is even one hill that was...
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CNN: Toodou in world's 23 hottest start-ups

CNN reports today that Toodou is among the 23 hottest start-ups worldwide. Of course the Toodou staff is very proud of this! There are two other Chinese companies on the list, Bokee (blogging) and Douban (book and music reviews).Some of the other companies that we share the list with are OpenBC (my favorite social networking tool), Korea's CyWorld (a virtual world that is HUGE in Korea), Last.fm (that I use to track the music that I play) and Finish Habbo Hotel (not really a start-up anymore,...
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